While Intel touts Netbooks, SanDisk cites solid-state 'hype'

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--At the Flash Memory Summit taking place here this week, makers of solid-state drives cited their worries about lackluster performance on Windows Vista and, with no small irony, the dangers of hype.

Solid-state drives have become the de facto storage device for the category of small, inexpensive notebook PCs called Metbooks, and they're offered in high-profile laptops such as the MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300.

Representatives of Micron and Intel (first and second from right, respectively) take part in a panel discussion at the Flash Memory Summit.

(Credit: Brooke Crothers)

While Don Larson, product line manager at Intel NAND Products Group, said the tiny size and low power requirements of Netbooks make them an ideal product for solid-state drives (adding that Netbooks are now migrating up to 10.2-inch displays), other SSD manufacturers engaged in a bit of self-examination. Both Dean Klein, vice president at Micron Technology, and Doreet Oren, director of product marketing at SanDisk, cited a Gartner report titled Hype Cycle for PC Technologies that showed solid-state drive hype peaking in June of last year.

"We're entering the trough of disillusionment," Klein said, citing the Gartner report.

SanDisk's Oren went on to say that new technologies float on a "sea of inflated expectations" with the disillusionment factor eventually "going on to a curve of actual adoption." Oren added: "There's a lot work still to be done."

So what are the outstanding issues tempering the hype? Windows Vista performance (more on Vista below) and SSD endurance. "SSDs wear out," said Todd Dinkelman, an applications engineer at Micron. And manufacturers have to make sure the wear-out happens gracefully and no sooner than five years, according to Intel, Micron, and SanDisk.

Dinkelman said that solid-state drives wear out due to data writes to the disk, which, in turn, is based on usage patterns. Put simply, a user constantly pounding an SSD with writes (recording data to the disk) will see a shorter life cycle than a person casually using such a drive in a Netbook for e-mail and web browsing.

Though hard-disk drives have endurance problems of their own, solid-state devices are particularly sensitive to the repeated writing of data to one area of the drive. All manufacturers agree that improved technology that intelligently controls the way data is written will mitigate this flaw to the point that it should not be a major issue in the upcoming generation of drives.

Ultimately, the next generation of drives need to be rated as, for example, five-year devices for heavy usage and longer terms for light usage, said Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities.

Gartner's Hype Cycle for PC Technologies shows SSD hype peaking in June 2007

(Credit: Brooke Crothers)

And the next generation is coming. Micron has already announced solid-state drives ranging up to 256GB in capacity and Intel is on the record as stating that it will follow suit with large-capacity drives. Upcoming drives for laptops are based on next-generation multi-level cell (MLC) technology that provides higher data densities, greater performance, and better reliability than drives used in ultra-light laptops today.

Last but not least there's the Vista problem: Solid-state drives do not perform well when doing certain operations on Vista. SanDisk's Oren expounded on what SanDisk CEO Eli Harari had stated last month in an earnings conference call. "It is well understood that Vista is not aware of what the storage device it is actually using," Oren said. "There's a lot of work being done at Microsoft together with SanDisk, together with Samsung, together with Intel and other standards bodies to actually enhance the awareness of the operating system of the device that it is using and we are heavily involved in that."

Micron's Dinkelman echoed this sentiment saying that a "new operating system would have to be developed in the PC environment" to make it better suited to solid-state drives.

"You need to have Microsoft on board," Cohen said. Some in the industry had expected Microsoft to integrate new features into a Vista Service Pack to make the operating system better optimized for solid-state drives but this never happened, Cohen said.

Sources at large SSD manufacturers also said that the first generation of devices may have been disappointing to some users because they didn't deliver the expected spike in performance--as the devices had been advertised to do.

[Mr. Dee]

The performance is not there, the reliability is not there, the capacities are just not there and they remain too expensive for normal day to day computing. The investment and commitment I believe are the true problems. The money these company's have made over the years off existing technology they sell should at least made them subsidize the price of SSDs out of the gate. Intel makes billions on processors, SanDisk billions on Flash drives. It doesn't have to cost this much, no matter how hard it is to develop. If you look at how AMD help to make 64-bit computing cheap and ubiquitous by adding the instructions to the x86 with the release of the Athlon 64 and Intel following suit, it shows that these same vendors can do the same for SSD and make it reach into the mainstream instead of becoming a 'one day in the future' technology. Vista's support of the technology is evidence of this, although I am beginning to discover a lot technologies are kinda half baked in the OS simply because they were put in at a late stage, like ASLR. Hopefully in Windows 7 Microsoft is focused on getting these technologies fully ready out of the box. In the mean time, price remains a deterrent and capacities, give me something that can compete with a mechanical hard disk. Don't let me choose between that 400 GB SSD and 5 TB Western Digital mechanical drive in 2010.

[Imalittleteapot]

Still wish I knew more about the problem with Vista was? Is it simply Vista writes too much data to the disk? I wish I had a few more technical details. Needing a whole new OS to take advantage of SSDs is a major claim. Seems like just a little reworking with the file system parts would get us most of the way there. I've been critical of Vista, but I think the faults of the new technology should shoulder some of the blame here too. If you need an OS to run your product you should try to get it to work with what's already out. To say rebuild your whole OS to suit our one device is a pretty steep request.

Anyway, when it comes to SSDs I'm going to be keeping my distance just a little bit long until these issues get sort out better.

[Dickson18]

This statement is pretty hard to swallow and very real life; but the fact of the matter is that the IC and nano technology on a circuit board was not the concept envisioned 20-30 years back when data was still read from poly technick records or silicon discs. We can't seem to get away from the needle and the record concept. Well you better bet there a whole lot of resistant both in hardware and in software. Well all that built up and the reworked needs to be ironed out. Lets just keep the OS to a minimum or keep the image as a jbod or drive letter & software strip the thing for real life performance. Its meant to read not really to read and write. Think of it as a DVDR or DVDRW you love to read way more than write. Capiche

[Imalittleteapot]

Okay. I guess I personally don't want what basically amounts to a giant CD-RW being the main drive on my system. My cheap $99 at the time 500 gig drives are plenty fast enough. Even on Vista I typically never have to wait for anything. Also, they can read and WRITE! It's like I get a two for one deal. Plus, I've never had a problem getting a drive to last five years before even in a laptop. Now all of a sudden these super durable SSDs have trouble lasting five years? How is that more durable? According to my math that's less durable.

Yes, buy this SSD that is faster and more durable except for when it's not. I'm sorry this is all starting to sound like a big old money fraud to me. In the end it sounds like my ancient spinning platter is way more versatile.

Basically they're trying to say it is faster, but faster than what? It's not faster at what I'm trying to do which is run Vista. It may be faster at something else, but I'm not trying to do something else. A speedboat is faster for crossing the lake too, but I'm not trying to cross the lake right now either. Do they think I want to constantly worry about how many times I've saved my Word document? Do they think developers want to worry about how many swap file writes the OS performs an hour? No, that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to not worry about writes.

The basic idea behind an SSD is that it would be super fast and not fail, but everything fails. Instead of basically taking a bet isn't it better to plan for failure instead? Anyway, this is how I plan for failure. I keep backups and I use an easy to come by hard drive so when it does fail I can just hop down to the store and get a new one for pocket change. Yes, hop. I'm a hopper. I hop all over. Anyway, how many regular drives could I buy for the price of one SSD? Sure, maybe one doesn't last five years, but I bet most of them do.

Sounds like these engineers need to get their butt back in the lab and fix their product instead of saying it'd work great if everybody else just did things different. Well a car with no engine would work real well if everyone just got out and pushed too, but unfortunately some of us have different plans here, like actually wanting to do constant rewrites.

[skrubol]

Flash memory is only good for so many writes. I think the leading stuff now is about 1 million. The problem with Windows (and some other OS's,) is that it requires having a swap file, in which the same locations are written very often. Normal personal computer usage only writes to the disk a small fraction of the amount that the swap file does, especially for a given location on the disk.
What the SSD manufacturers have done, from what I read years ago, was that they have the drive remap the location of files on the disk as the disk detects lots of rewrites. So the swap file will hop from location A to B to C, etc to keep one area of the flash from getting worn out. This movement isn't seen by the OS, it's mapped entirely within the drive.
What the SSD makers would probably like to see from Windows is the ability to turn off the swap file (you currently can't without nasty consequences.) The other thing SSD makers could do would be to put massive write caches on the drives, specifically to deal with the swap file (1-4 GB, current drives have at most 32MB caches.) This would nearly eliminate the problem and would give a speed boost to boot, but would make the drives even more expensive than they already are.